


You Hold the Key to my Dreams

by vogue91



Category: Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-07
Updated: 2018-03-07
Packaged: 2019-03-28 05:20:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13897113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vogue91/pseuds/vogue91
Summary: All so that he was not going to be forced to still look at her face, marked by rain and anger.And he, always so inscrutable and bashful, had let the words flow, fast and likely meaningless. Perhaps, a vain attempt at not letting her see his true intentions, as if he was scared by them.





	You Hold the Key to my Dreams

It was undeniable, he had tried.

Tried to keep her far away from him, tried to get away himself, as if having her close did not make him feel completely safe.

It hadn’t been enough to appease that sense of deep and rooted discomfort that inhabited him since the very moment he had laid eyes on that girl, radiant, simple and so absurdly magnetic.

Dangerous, of course, perhaps without even knowing she was.

And, despite all, he had managed to vent his most hidden thoughts, those accompanying him in his moments of silence, of solitude.

All so that he was not going to be forced to still look at her face, marked by rain and anger.

And he, always so inscrutable and bashful, had let the words flow, fast and likely meaningless. Perhaps, a vain attempt at not letting her see his true intentions, as if he was scared by them.

Because it had never been rooted in him that foolish habit to dream.

Dreaming _her_ face, or perhaps imagining it, but still as a pure obsession, almost like a nightmare, not like the light sleep lacking torments that he would have expected from such a tender feeling.

And so much rejected during the years, as if love rendered a man less human, as if it was capable of destroying him, wounding him, annihilating him.

It was what scared him, a fear which he could have named nothing but Elizabeth Bennet.

So he had poured on her his past, handwritten on a paper dampened by the rain, for he hadn’t had the courage to speak about it.

Darcy deemed himself such a man, yet she had been capable to make him stand in front of his limitations like no one else had done before.

She had brought to the greyish light of that rainy day the secrets that he had strenuously fought to conceal, conceal them to the eyes of the world, inside himself, for there had been a time when that place had been secure.

He had written of love, of hate, of revenge, of greed.

He had written about George Wickham as the worst of men, yet he had done so without a grudge, not to plant in her the seed of hate, but to make her open her eyes, perhaps to protect her from the same wounds that were still marking poor Georgiana.

And yet, he still wasn’t satisfied.

Closed among the walls of that house, cold and lacking any form of human sentiment, Darcy wondered what was going to be of his life.

He had broken the barriers of that soul he didn’t even know for sure he had; he had left a woman, that weapon mortal and incomprehensible, coming so close to him to read inside him; he had refused every value, every privacy, every kind of dignity forcing him to always make the best decisions, and always the wrong ones.

And still he had her face marked inside his mind, disturbed and enraged, bold and pugnacious. Because Elizabeth for sure knew forgiveness, she just wasn’t sure whether he deserved it.

And it was this missing certainty that troubled him, sharply. She had the key to free feelings in him numb, frozen, and still she refused to use it, for she didn’t know what she was going to find inside his heart.

He closed briefly his eyes, cradling into images from that afternoon, under that gazebo where he had let a part of himself, where he had given her the baton of his mistakes, where he had confessed as if she was a priest and not... what? What was Elizabeth Bennet?

He tried to reduce her to a single essence, a simple one, that he was able to understand, and yet he realized that there was no way to put her in a cage of a single definition, to make the thought of her rational.

He would have given up on reason, his only weapon, he would’ve taken it away from his mind and he would have allowed himself to dream, finally without shadows or ghost from a close past.

He would’ve torn the keys off of her hands, he would’ve let flow every part of himself that reminded him he was alive and that made him believe, even just for a moment, that he could be so with her.

That he could be that, until he wouldn’t have seen that such a world wouldn’t have fitted him, or perhaps that he wasn’t made for that kind of existence: one that could be called normal, one where a man and a woman truly knew the meaning behind that ‘happily ever after’, one that his nature deceptively haughty and unpleasant forbade him to have.

But he was a man, and as much unbecoming as he found it, he still had the faculty to decide what to dream about.

He tried to hide his own desires from himself, as if they could show just by looking at him, as if in them there was truly something that could not be revealed without consequences. He hid, for it was what he had done during his whole miserable existence.

Hidden, behind a meaningless and dull reason.

Then, looking at the green meadows of Rosings from the window, he conceded to himself the luxury to dream about Elizabeth on that grass, imagining her running, reaching him and granting him her forgiveness for his actions so cynical and despicable.

Perhaps, had she truly done that, Darcy would’ve lost regard for her, for her being so awfully proud and beautifully pensive, reasoning, as little among the many women he had known.

He couldn’t hide a smile for this though, even though he would’ve much liked to.

He raved, and he was strangely glad of that.

After all, he had determined that reason had no reason to exist anymore in that circumstance, as brief as it was, of his existence, the one that had Elizabeth’s face engraved on it.

For once, he would’ve allowed himself to dream in peace.


End file.
